Lifelong Learning at the NLI and dlr Lexicon

This year UCD continues its partnership with the National Library of Ireland and dlr Lexicon by offering a number of history courses as part of the Lifelong Learning programme.

Lifelong Learning at the National Library of Ireland and dlr Lexicon

UCD Lifelong Learning courses are part-time specific interest courses that are participative, engaging and facilitated by experts in their field. The courses are open to all and provide a chance to explore a subject without concerns about assessment. These courses are part of a long tradition in University College Dublin, and follow the legacy of the university’s founder Cardinal John Henry Newman.

This year UCD continues its partnership with the National Library of Ireland and dlr Lexicon by offering a number of history courses as part of the Lifelong Learning programme. The history courses running in these locations in 2018 are:

Semester 2 Modules (Spring 2018)

This course explores the background and various stages of the Land Wars from 1876 to 1909. It explores the pre-Land War milieu, its various phases over a thirty year period and how the countryside was mobilised during this formative period as the strong farmers and shopkeepers consolidated their influence in the countryside, with the labourer, town tenant and small farmer losing out. In addition, it explores the role that local activists as well as people like Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell played in the mobilization of the countryside to demand peasant proprietorship and the end of landlordism in Ireland.

What was it like to be a medieval pilgrim? Where did they go? What happened on the way? Any journey to a sacred place undoubtedly held a spiritual dimension. Pilgrims bought souvenirs from continental shrines dedicated to familiar Irish saints and visited other religious sites to fulfil vows, for penance or to cure sickness. However, evidence exists of more worldly experiences as well. Roadside hostels provided rest while entertainment existed in the form of taverns and even the occasional Church-run brothel. This course explores individual pilgrim writings uncovering what motivated Irish people to travel, the routes they followed and their experiences on the road.

Medieval Christians often engaged in physical travel as a means to bringing themselves closer to God. These journeys could serve a wide variety of spiritual functions: to fulfil a vow, as a penance, to cure sickness, or simply to expand their own faith. However, at a time when few people travelled beyond their own birthplace, those who did viewed the opportunity as an adventure, a chance to see the wider world and engage in new and often very worldly experiences. Pilgrims shopped for souvenirs at the shrines of familiar Irish saints on the continent and also visited other important local sites. Hostels were established to provide rest and there was ample entertainment in the form of taverns and even the occasional Church-run brothel.

This course will investigate the mechanisms by which Irish people decided to undertake pilgrimage and travel in the middle ages. We will investigate what it was like to be a pilgrim, where they went and what happened along the way. Classes will emphasise the experiences of individual pilgrims through reading and discussion of the primary sources they produced – texts which reveal tales of piety but also adventure, vice and even murder on pilgrim trails.

Students will also be introduced to the sacred places pilgrims travelled to, both in Ireland and abroad, leading to an understanding of the medieval experience of these sites and also the development of sacred space from the pre-Christian period through to the modern revival of pilgrimage.

Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story. Memoirs are both historical documents and literary narratives; creative works and social records.

This module asks questions about the relationship between how we remember and how we articulate or represent memory and memory making. It draws on literary, historical, philosophical and creative approaches to individual and communal memory practices and considers how such practices change over time. A key focus is the interrogation of the memoir as history and the memoir as art. We analyse the subjective processes of selective memory making that are shared across literary and historical memoirs as well as examining how an individual life story generates broader historical meaning in wider national contexts and traditions.

This course will take place over 4 Tuesday mornings: 10:00am – 12:30pm
April 3,10,17,24. Fee: €100Book your place here.

The year 1918 is a pivotal one in modern history: it represents both a beginning and an end. The tumult of the Great War dominated much of the year and the ending of that war is the essential event of 1918 and will be examined in detail. But the story of the ending of the war is part of a much wider narrative of social, economic, political and cultural change. That the war had lasted so long and been fought in the manner that it had ensured that post-war society could never return in its pre-war aspect. This was already apparent in 1918 in everything from the extension of suffrage to women to the rise of the labour movement.

This course will take place over 4 Fridays, 11.00 am – 1.00 pm
April 6, 13, 20, 27. Fee: €100Book your place here.